My Favorite Movies: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Movie trilogies are notorious for starting off with a bang and gradually losing steam as the series presses on. Sure, there are exceptions, but how many lousy cash-in third installments have you seen of once-great franchises? Fortunately, such a fate didn't befall the wildly successful trio of Indiana Jones movies, which started off with the terrific Raiders of the Lost Ark and ended with today's subject, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I've waffled for years on how to rank these movies relative to one another. Middle installment Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is clearly the weakest of the three, but the relative merits of films #1 and #3 are the subject of much debate. Finally, I've resolved it in my mind: Last Crusade is the best of the three. It's got the same exhilarating sense of adventure, but with a more focused and interesting plot, and the addition of Sean Connery as Prof. Henry Jones Sr. It's not a huge difference, but I'm calling this one in favor of part three.

I'm not going to write a full treatment of Temple of Doom, but I'd like to make some comments about it before we get to the main attraction. The weaknesses are well-documented: the ridiculous mysticism of the Indian village, the pointless gross-out scenes with monkey brains and eyeball soup, and the inane Thuggee human sacrifice cult. There's also Kate Capshaw's relentlessly annoying turn as nightclub singer Willie Scott. But there's a lot to like about Temple of Doom as well, from the Short Round character to the thrilling action pieces, which are the best in the series. You're treated to:

- Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) fighting mobster Lao Che's thugs and poison that Che has slipped him.
- Jones and his cohorts escaping safely from Che's crashing plane
- The mine cart chase, escaping Mola Ram's underground temple
- A trapped Jones cutting a rope bridge and escaping Ram and his henchmen once again.

Really a lot of dynamite scenes here, and certainly a high-quality movie that I give 4.5 stars; it just doesn't quite measure up to the five-star standards of the other two pictures. Let's move along to Last Crusade.

Young Indiana in Utah
Last Crusade opens with a few scenes not really essential to the titular Crusade but that are still pretty fun. In the open, 13-year old Indiana Jones (River Phoenix) is out with his Boy Scout troop when he happens upon a gang in a cave. Jones recovers their stolen Cross of Coronado and makes his escape via a circus train.

This open sets the backstory and provides the opportunity for some funny in-jokes; Indiana getting the first of his trademark fedoras, learning to use a whip, picking up a fear of snakes, and dealing with his proper, bookish, Holy Grail-obsessed archaeology professor father, Henry Jones Sr (Connery).


Indiana still after the Cross
26 years later, Jones (Ford) rights the wrong of his previous encounter with the gang, recovering the Cross of Coronado after a battle at sea and restoring it to where it belongs, "in a museum" run by pal Marcus Brody.


The Crusade
The nature of this quest is finally revealed in a meeting with wealthy douchebag Walter Donovan (Julian Glover), who tells Indy of the elder Jones' recent disappearance and shows him an incomplete tomb inscription indicating the location of the long-lost Holy Grail ("the cup of Christ"). Upon returning home, Indy receives his father's meticulous Grail diary by mail and sets out to Venice to save his Dad.


Italy
Upon arrival, Indy meets up with Dr Elsa Schneider, a woman whose appearance is many standard deviations above the norm for professional scientists. Honestly, if female scientists in the real world looked as good as they invariably do on film, my days would be a little brighter. Anyway, following Dad's trail to a library, Jones ends up in an underground catacomb where he finds the remainder of Donovan's inscription on a knight's tomb. Jones and Scnheider narrowly escape being set ablaze by members of The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, then flee from the Brotherhood in a speedboat chase. Who doesn't like a speedboat chase? Jones manages to extract the location of Jones Sr from one of the brothers after pointing out that he doesn't so much care about the Grail, and he and Schneider set off for Nazi territory while dispatching Marcus to Turkey. Also, he nails Schneider at some point.


Germany/Austria
I like movies that take place in castles. When is a castle ever a bad thing in a film? On that note, I highly recommend Where Eagles Dare, a 1968 Clint Eastwood / Richard Burton movie with a castle.

This castle is, naturally, a Nazi one - I think the creative team of Lucas and Spielberg saw how well they worked as villains in Raiders and went back to that well once more. Smart move.

Once in Grunwald castle, Jones locates his father, and the interplay between Ford and Connery opens up a lot of comedic potential for the movie from that point on. It also serves to drive a lot of the action, particularly the bumbling of Jones Sr. After losing the diary to the Nazis (turns out that Schneider, in addition to being fairly easy, is a Nazi agent and that Donovan has sold out to them as well) and being captured, the Jones boys escape via motorcycle and make their way to Berlin to recover the diary. I have no idea how they found who they were looking for, nor where they parked, but they get what they need and try to get the hell out of Dodge.

After an aborted ride on a Zeppelin and later an aeroplane (whose tail Jones Sr memorably riddles with bullets in a botched attempt at tailgunnery), the Joneses finally reach safety and try to find Marcus and beat the Nazis to the Grail location.


Turkey
The Joneses meet up with their old pal, jovial, red hat-wearing Sallah (John Rhys Davies), find out that Marcus has (of course) been captured by the nefarious Germans, and head to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon to head them off. Indy, Sallah, and the old men take on the Nazis' military escort. My favorite part is when Sallah rounds up a few camels despite Indy's strict instructions not to: "I said no camels, Sallah - that's five camels!"

After an epic struggle with the Nazi tanks (one of which flies off a cliff with Indy apparently but obviously not really on board, the quartet chase after Elsa and Donovan to the Grail location.


The Canyon of the Crescent Moon
Naturally, the Grail can't be had so easily as to just wander into the temple and grab it - the cup turns out to be guarded by lethal booby traps, as the poor saps Donovan sends in at first learn the hard way. Indy has no intention of doing Donovan's dirty work, but a pistol shot to Henry's side convinces him to pursue the Grail to save his father's life. Fortunately, with the Grail diary, he's able to defeat the three traps.

1) The Breath of God - "only the penitent man will pass." Jones figures this out just in time to avoid having his head sliced off.

2) The Word of God - Jones remembers that "Jehovah" starts with an I in Latin a bit late, but still manages to traverse a chasm by stepping on the right lettered stones.

3) The Path of God - Indy bravely jumps across an insurmountable canyon, only to discover that it was an optical illusion.

Schneider and Donovan follow, and decide they should be the first to pick out the chalice granting eternal life. Schneider picks out a gaudy bejeweled one, Donovan drinks from it, and ages almost instantly, turning into a pile of bones and disintegrating in a matter of seconds. "He chose...poorly."

It's fun to watch Donovan's ignominious end because of what a greedy sellout he is. Every time I watch this movie, I can't help but think: why would anyone want to be immortal? I absolutely would have no interest in an infinite existence, on Earth or anywhere. Maybe that (and its utter lack of truth) is why I find the Heaven Myth so unappealing, I don't know. But I can assure you, I wouldn't risk my life on Elsa Schneider's low-chance-of success cup identification prowess just to gain something that doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun anyway.

Indy, of course, "chose...wisely," picking the modest "cup of a carpenter" that was indeed Jesus', and scrambles back to the temple entrance to save Henry with the Grail's healing power. Schneider greedily tries to take the cup past the temple seal, bringing the whole structure crashing down and casting her in a bottomless pit after one last futile effort to grab for it. The Joneses, Marcus, and Sallah ride off into the sunset.


Speculation and Conclusion
Someone made a point about Raiders of the Lost Ark that I find difficult to reconcile: for all of the protagonists derring-do and heroics, the end would be exactly the same even if he hadn't done anything: Nazis find the Ark, open it, and die. I can't find a way out of that logic, unfortunately. The same is not true for Temple of Doom - without Indy's infiltration of the temple, Mola Ram enslaves kids indefinitely, and they and that rock never get back to the village safely.

I wonder, then, how Indiana Jones' work affects the conclusion of Last Crusade. If he's not around, and Henry Jones sends the diary back to America and Indy doesn't drag it back to Europe, the Nazis might never find the Grail. Pretty much neutral. If they did manage to find the Grail without the diary, using the inscription or whatever, they would probably have still either died via the booby traps or from bad cup selection - again neutral. I dunno, once again I'm not sure that Indiana Jones' adventures result in a net positive here.

But who cares? These movies are too fun to worry about such matters. Just grab some popcorn and watch, alright?